Fritinancy

April linkfest

Journalist, novelist, and author Kurt Andersen (Spy magazine, Fantasyland, Evil Geniuses) wrote about “how an article about genomic sequencing led to an afternoon playing around with AI branding tools.” The names and logos these tools spat out—Dynester, Aerodynamiq, ModernZeal—led Andersen to muse about how real life is increasingly indistinguishable from science fiction.

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Speaking of science fiction, here’s a list of fictional super-metals, from Adamantium to Zortium.

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If you’re a fan of the New York Times Spelling Bee, you’ll want to try Tylogram, a new word-formation game created by William Shunn, the genius behind Spelling Bee Solver. As with the Bee, you’ll create words for points; slide the tiles around the grid to maximize their value. But it’s even trickier than that! (And fun.)

 

Kosher (for Passover) cannabis

Years ago, long before California legalized cannabis, I knew a pair of Jewish Deadheads whose Passover table always included “sweet herb” (wink, wink) along with the traditional bitter herb. (Or so they said. They never invited me to their seder.) I’ve lost touch with them, but if they’re still observing the ritual, I bet they’re plotzing over this year’s convergence of 4/20—the equivalent of St. Cannabis’ Day—and the first day of Passover. It’s like Thanksgivukkah, but for stoners. Call it Weed-Over, if you must. (The coinage belongs to Arielle Kaplan, a writer for Alma, the new-ish Jewish publication “for ladies with chutzpah.”)

So: How best to honor the occasion? Is cannabis kosher? Is cannabis kosher for Passover? Are we going to be asking 420 questions instead of the traditional four?

To the last question I say: Isn’t the seder already punishingly long? As for the others, here’s what I’ve dug up.

Name in the wild: Blunts+Moore

Now that the sale, possession, and use of recreational cannabis have been legal in California for a full year, what’s happening with weed branding? Well, cannabis ads are still outlawed on San Francisco’s Muni buses, streetcars, and cable cars. On the other hand, I’ve been noticing a lot of outdoor advertising in strategic locations around the Bay Area: big, bold billboards near freeway on-ramps and bridges. Some are for companies that were founded before full legalization took effect on January 1, 2018, like Eaze (a delivery service) and Weedmaps (“a community where businesses and consumers can search and discover cannabis products, become educated on all things cannabis, review cannabis businesses and connect with other like-minded users”).

But one new brand caught my attention when I saw it on a billboard on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge: Blunts+Moore. Merely descriptive was my first thought. After all, blunt has been a slang term for “marijuana cigarette” for at least 30 years; the Random House Dictionary of Historical Slang connects it to Phillies Blunt*, a trademark in use since 1958 for a brand of inexpensive cigars.

But wait: there’s more. And also Moore.

How Serra got its name

Recreational cannabis has been sold legally in Oregon since October 1, 2015; since January 1, 2017, dispensaries have been required to apply for and receive licenses from the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. In early January, the Portland Business Journal reported* that the OLCC had received 1,907 recreational marijuana license applications in 2016, and that the total number of licensed retailers had more than doubled in 2016, from 99 to 260.**

One of those green rush beneficiaries is Serra, which opened its first store in Portland in 2016 and which now operates a second Portland store as well as one in Eugene, home of the University of Oregon.

 

Logo design and application by Thomas C. Bradley for Official Mfg. Co., Portland.

 

The stores have been praised for their high-end aesthetics (“The most sophisticated cannabis dispensary in the city, if not the country.” – Wallpaper. “When you leave Serra, the feeling is similar to leaving Anthropologie: slightly numbed by the curated beauty of the place, a sense of being underdressed, but without the guilt of paying too much for something you'll ruin in one smoke sesh” – the Potlander, which is not a typo). And the verbal identity is similarly bar-raising: no “leaf” pun, no 420 variation, no “green,” no “bud,” no “Mary Jane.” 

But where does “Serra” come from, and what does it mean?

Nicely named: Gateway

What’s so special about “Gateway”? Not much, at first appraisal. The word appears in more than 600 trademarks, including that of a pioneering U.S. computer company founded in 1985 in Sioux City, Iowa. (That company, whose original name was Gateway 2000, used a Holstein cow as its mascot; it was bought in 2007 by Taiwan-based Acer, which also acquired Gateway.com and which now produces computers under the Gateway brand.)

“Gateway” names abound in the San Francisco Bay Area thanks to the region’s association with the Golden Gate and the bridge that spans it. There are Gateway apartments, a Gateway Bank, a Golden Gateway hotel, and a long-planned Gateway Park at the foot of (confusingly) the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge.

But the Gateway I want to praise here is Oakland-based Gateway Incubator, which is named for a different sort of gateway.

Name in the News: Marvina

This week a San Francisco startup, Marvina, launched its subscription delivery service for medical marijuana. For $95, $175, or $325 a month, San Franciscans who are qualified under California’s Compassionate Use Act can receive 7, 14, or 28 “top-shelf” grams of cannabis, tastefully packaged and delivered to their doors by an employee of a medical-marijuana dispensary.  

 

“Co-founder Dane Pieri came up with the idea because he was intimidated and overwhelmed by the cannabis dispensaries,” writes reporter Zara Stone in OZY.* “‘It’s like when you’re in the grocery store at the wine aisle; we didn’t know what to do,’ he told OZY. He thought he’d create a service where choice wasn’t in the equation.”

And the name? Here’s the story on the Marvina About page:

What does Marvina mean?

Nothing. Well actually its [sic] a nod to Malvina Reynolds, one of our favorite songwriters. Her song Little Boxes was also the theme song of one of our favorite TV shows, Weeds. (Ok, when we talk about Weeds we really mean seasons 1-3 because the other seasons really don't compare to those first three. If you're a fan of the show you know what we mean.)

For those of you unfamiliar with Malvina Reynolds (1900-1978), here’s a brief bio. Her birth surname was Milder; she was anything but. Here she is singing “Little Boxes.”

“Weeds,” of course, was Showtime’s long-running series about a housewife named Nancy (which also happens to be the name of Malvina Reynolds’s daughter) who starts selling marijuana after her husband’s premature death leaves her family in dire straits. The name of the fictional community in which Nancy lives, Agrestic, has been adopted by a marijuana dispensary in Corvallis, Oregon.

Marvina is an elegant portmanteau**—mar from marijuana and vina from Malvina—that stands out amid the ticky-tacky clutter of similar-sounding names in this area (see my post on 420 names). The Malvina Reynolds connection has extra resonance for a service that delivers its product in “little boxes.”

Speaking of weedy names, I’m headed to Portland, Oregon, for the next several days to attend the annual meeting of the American Name Society and sister organizations. On Saturday afternoon I’ll be giving a talk at ANS titled “Velvet Elvis at the Mary Mart: The New Normal Nomenclature of Legal Cannabis.” I hope to see some of you at my session – or maybe at the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year vote Friday afternoon.

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* Sorry, I don’t know how OZY got its name. Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair?

** The company’s writing style, as we’ve seen, is less elegant.

Word of the Week: Trimmigrant

Trimmigrant: A person who travels to a cannabis-growing region during harvest season to trim marijuana buds and get them ready for market. A blend of trim and immigrant, although the workers may be native-born Americans from outside the region.

Olivia Cueva of Youth Radio reported on December 4, 2014:

California’s Humboldt County is known for its towering redwoods. But this region about 200 miles north of San Francisco has another claim to fame. Humboldt is to weed what Napa is to fine wine — it’s the heart of marijuana production in the U.S.

Every fall, young people, mostly in their 20s, come from all over the world to work the marijuana harvest. They come seeking jobs as “trimmers” — workers who manicure the buds to get them ready for market. The locals have a name for these young migrant workers: “trimmigrants.”

There are more than 100,000 marijuana plants growing in the hills around Humboldt, the county sheriff’s office estimates. They all need to be harvested around the same time and processed quickly to avoid mold and other problems. So from September through November, it’s all hands on deck. That’s where trimmigrants, also called scissor drifters, come in.

Trimmers are paid by the pound, Cueva reported. Fast trimmers can make $300 to $500 a day (cash only, of course).

Trimmigrant appears to be a relatively recent coinage. The earliest relevant definition in Urban Dictionary is dated November 12, 2013. I found a slightly older citation, dated November 5, 2013, in a story broadcast on the Sacramento CBS affiliate (“Trimmigrants Flocking to Nevada County for Marijuana Harvest Jobs”):

Tree works as a trimmer to help clean and ready the marijuana harvest. He’s one of dozens of self-name [sic] “trimmigrants” coming to work on both legal and illegal pot farms in the county for cash.

Related words of the week: budtender, ganja-preneur.

November Linkfest

From A-bomb to to zoom: the Weed Blog’s extensive—indeed, staggering—lexicon of slang terms for marijuana. (I discussed one of those terms, 420, in a post published earlier this week.)

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Speaking of specialized lexicons, check out The D.C. Manual of Style and Usage, Washington City Paper’s entertainingly written and copiously illustrated guide. One of my favorite entries: “Blelvis: A portmanteau of ‘black’ and ‘Elvis.’ Refers exclusively to D.C.’s mostly elusive, semifamous busker; he likely never uses the words ‘portmanteau’ and ‘busker,’ but he can sing every song in the Elvis Presley catalog.” Also: “Hipster. A term that is somehow both loaded and meaningless. If you feel compelled to use it, talk to an editor.”

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The new first-person-shooter game Destiny, released in September, features a huge arsenal of weapons, and I can only imagine the brainstorming sessions that produced names like Praedyth’s Revenge, Pocket Infinity, Strange Suspect, and the excellent Doctor Nope. The Australian game-review site Kotaku provides a ranking of all 74 names. (Via Our Bold Hero.) IGN lists the weapons by category (pulse rifles, fusion rifles, rocket launchers, etc.).

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An “ally” is what British soldiers in Afghanistan call “a battlefield fashionista--desirables include having a beard, using a different rifle, carrying vast amounts of ammunition, being dusty and having obscene amounts of tattoos and hair.” A “crow” is a new soldier recently out of training. From a guide to Afghanistan battlefield slang published by BBC News. (Via Language Hat.)

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You had me at “you had me at”: Ben Yagoda on the post-Jerry Maguire life of a meme.

 

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If you’re curious about the origins of Toyota model names, this CarScoops explainer is a reasonable starting point. The Camry got its name from Japanese kanmuri, meaning “crown”; the Supra is a direct borrowing from Latin (“above”). But this story about the Yaris made me wonder: “Yaris is an amalgamation of words from Greek mythology and German. In Greek mythology, ‘Charis’ was a symbol of beauty and elegance. Toyota swapped the ‘Ch’  with ‘Ya’ – German for ‘yes’ – to symbolise the perceived reaction of European markets to the car’s styling.”

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The predictably zany stories of how some British ad agencies—Doofer, tenthree, A Large Evil Corporation, and others got their names.

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Tom Magliozzi, co-host of NPR’s long-running “Car Talk,” died November 3 at 77. In his honor, here’s a link to one of my favorite features of the show: the punny staff credits, from sculling coach Rose Dior to assistant disciplinarian Joaquin D’Planque. (Via Henry Fuhrmann.)

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Cherpumple? So 2010. A Houston bakery’s pumpecapple piecake (pumpkin + pecan + apple) is this year’s turducken of desserts. (Via Barry Popik.)

Image via Houston Eater.

 

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Five contemporary authors tell how they titled their books. (My own semi-facetious take on book titling here.)

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And speaking of novels: “Can’t get a deal for that novel manuscript? Try ad agencies. Young & Rubicam commissioned Booker award-nominated novelist William Boyd to tell any story he wanted as long as it featured a Land Rover vehicle.” By Ad Broad, who calls herself “the oldest working writer in advertising.”

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From veteran name developer David Placek, founder of Lexicon Branding, some tips to help startups avoid making naming mistakes. First piece of advice: The name “doesn’t have to be clever. It just has to communicate.” And, adds Placek, stop it already with the -ly names. Yep. 

 

420: The Brand

Last week voters in Alaska and Oregon legalized the sale and use of marijuana for recreational and medicinal purposes. Pending Congressional review, the District of Columbia will soon legalize limited possession and cultivation of marijuana. That means nearly half of the 50 states have decriminalized some form of the sale and possession of cannabis.*

It also means that in places where marijuana is legal, so is branding and marketing of dispensaries, retail stories, products, and services.

This legitimate market may be new, but some naming themes have already emerged. One of the most conspicuous is the numeral 420, which has a long history in cannabis culture.

October Linkfest

When McDonald’s met Play-Doh, and other examples of peculiar co-branding. (Marketplace)

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Forward thinking, incremental thinking, and three other proven alternatives to brainstorming. (Strategy+Business)

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Worst. Infographics. Ever. (WTF Visualizations, via The Guardian, via Paul Wiggins)

 

Bad math, bad spelling, and … chickens? Many more like this at WTF Visualizations.

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“Years ago, I asked one of my mentors what he thought was the hardest part of designing a typeface. I was expecting ‘the cap S’ or ‘the italic lowercase’ or something like that. But he answered without hesitation: the name. Finding the name is the hardest part.” (Tobias Frere-Jones on the names of typefaces, via Michael Bierut)

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M life (“Own Vegas”) is MGM Resorts’ customer rewards program. M’life Wellness is a fledgling medical marijuana dispensary in Las Vegas. Does MGM have a trademark case? (Las Vegas Review Journal, via Proof of Use)

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“Can I stipulate the awesomeness of a lawsuit based on parts of speech?” Ben Yagoda on the trademark dispute between management consultant Dov Seidman and yogurt maker Chobani over the slogan “How Matters.” (Lingua Franca)

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In a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki, director of My Neighbor Totoro and many other brilliant animated films, a new species of velvet worm has been named Eoperipatus totoro. (Via Tom Moultrie)

             

Eoperipatus totoro.                                        Catbus in My Neighbor Totoro.

 

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“Foodster,” “chefstaurateur,” “drool-worthy”: the food site Eater would very much like to ban their use forever. Not sure what “kerfuffle” is doing on that list—it’s a perfectly cromulent word! (Eater, via Lisa Newman-Wise)

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“Crone”? “UAV”? “RPA”? A lot of people in the drone industry hate the word “drone,” but they can’t agree on a replacement. (Wall Street Journal)

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Acronym of the month: PNIS (Proceedings of the National Institute of Science, a not exactly factual entity). PNIS calls itself “the journal that publishes just about anything (real or fake)”; categories include HARD (Honest And Reliable Data) and SOFD (Satirical Or Fake Data). “An analysis of the cost of raising a child like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes” is, you will be gratified to know, an example of HARD research. (Via Christopher Phipps)